operator’ destined for leadership. Not seeing the same qualities of ‘leadership’ in Landes, SOE marked him out for a radio operator and sent him to their wireless school at Thame, near Aylesbury. Here he met another fellow student, destined to join him in France. Gilbert Norman, also an ex-public school boy, was an imposing figure whose regular features, permanent suntan and moustache gave him the air of an actor who specialised in playing cads – or perhaps army captains – in a seaside repertory company. In fact, he was a chartered accountant from Llandudno. In July 1942 the two men passed out as fully qualified SOE wireless operators.
Roger Landes had done well. ‘He has the eye of a marksman … works well with others … liked for his keenness … very fit and tries hard … did exceptionally well on his own,’ his trainers wrote on his various reports: ‘a pleasant little man who takes great interest and trouble in what he does …’. Of all Landes’s attributes it would be his ability to work alone and his unobtrusiveness which would make him a truly great secret agent.
But Roger Landes was now much more than the sum of his good reports.
He had been transformed – and he had transformed himself – from a young Jewish refugee from Paris, working as an architect’s clerk in the LCC, into a fully capable secret agent and radio operator, ready to take the fight to the enemy in occupied France. To be sure, he still looked as he had always done: small, pleasant, unremarkable. But inside, he was now something completely different. Something hard, uncompromising, focused – even a little cold; always alert, always suspicious, always watchful. Above all, he was confident of his own strength and his ability to survive and to endure.
3
On 26 January 1942, a fortnight or so before Roger Landes saw the message on the company noticeboard at Prestatyn, a young German officer stepped down from a first-class carriage at Saint-Jean station in Bordeaux. His Gestapo uniform, if anyone had glimpsed it, might have attracted attention, for few if any of these had been seen in Bordeaux at this time of the war. But muffled and greatcoated against the exceptional cold that had gripped France that January, he would have seemed to most to be just another German officer making his way in the throng that pressed towards the checkpoint at the station exit. Yet, over the next few years, twenty-eight-year-old Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Dohse would come to dominate the city and shape its events more than any other German who had come to Bordeaux since the occupation.
Six foot three and of athletic build, with sharp grey eyes deep set under a heavy brow in a pale oval face; chestnut, but fast vanishing hair; an easy smile and regular features (apart from rather small a mouth) – Dohse (pronounced ‘dosuh’) was a man who commanded attention quite as much as Roger Landes deflected it.
His journey to this moment had been a long one. Although his grandfather had been a peasant farmer in Silesia, his father, Hinrich, had risen to become a French teacher in the little Schleswig-Holstein town of Elmshorn, north of Hamburg. Here, Friedrich was born in July 1913. His family was respectable, bourgeois, Lutheran and of moderate political views (which he shared). Like his sisters and brother, he attended the local secondary school, before moving on to commercial college in Hamburg, where he excelled in French. Leaving school at seventeen, he travelled the short distance to the city’s port where he joined the merchant marine, serving on passenger liners to South America and East Africa. In 1933, at the height of the German Depression and finding himself unemployed, the twenty-year-old Friedrich joined the Hamburg police and local Nazi party. Later he would insist that he became a Nazi because it was the only way to get a job, though it was often remarked that, on the rare occasions he wore his Gestapo uniform, he never failed to emblazon it with the ‘Golden Party Badge’, awarded only to those in the Nazi party of ‘special merit’, or who had been amongst the first 100,000 to join.
Whatever Dohse’s motives, becoming a Nazi seems to have worked, for after five months as an ordinary policeman he was offered a job with the criminal police in a Hamburg suburb. Dohse soon transferred to the Gestapo in Kiel, where he was employed in counter-espionage against marine saboteurs. He continued his progress into the hierarchy of Hitler’s Germany by joining the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi paramilitary wing, on 1 June 1934. Just weeks later Hitler destroyed the organisation in the great ‘blood purge’ of 30 June. Nothing daunted, two years after this reverse, Dohse became a member of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Hitler’s ‘protection squadron’, and wore its badge, with the letters SS in the form of two jagged lightning bolts, for the rest of his wartime career. In 1937, Dohse completed his eight weeks’ infantry training and on the outbreak of war was called up, quickly rising to the rank of sergeant. It is difficult not to see the young Dohse during these years as a man of ambition and strong patriotic convictions, dedicated to serving his country, while scrambling up the Nazi ladder as fast as he could.
After brief spells first in the army, and then the Luftwaffe, Dohse was posted back to the Gestapo as a sergeant in the spring of 1941. Now married and with two young children, he was sent on 15 June to Paris. Here he was seconded to the counter-espionage section of the newly established German directorate of security (the BdS), headquartered at 82–84 Avenue Foch – an address which was already becoming one of the most feared in France. At the time the Gestapo was not formally permitted to operate in France, making Dohse one of the first Gestapo officers to work on French soil.
It was this posting, more than any other event of his young life, which transformed Dohse from a junior up-and-coming member of the Gestapo into a subtle, cunning and accomplished counter-intelligence operator. For it was here that he met the man who would become both the mentor from whom he learnt his skills and the protector who would cover his back in the dangerous times ahead.
Karl Bömelburg, aged fifty-six in 1941, was the son of a pastry cook and a man of many skills, disguises and aliases (including ‘Charles Bois’, ‘Herr Bennelburger’ and ‘Colonel Mollemburg’). According to both Paris rumour and British intelligence records, he was also – very unusually for a high-ranking Nazi – known to have homosexual proclivities. Elegant and cultivated, Bömelburg was a notable bon viveur, fluent in French, an enthusiastic Francophile and a master of the art of spying. ‘Though not a political Nazi,’ according to his superior in Berlin, ‘he was completely loyal and a committed anti-communist.’ According to one account, he had spent eight years before the war operating undercover as a silk merchant in Lyon. Other records suggest that he was part of the German embassy in Paris in 1938, where, with the knowledge of the French government, he was tasked with rooting out communist subversives from the German immigrant population in France. During these interwar years, under the cover of his anti-communist work, Bömelburg built a German spy network which extended deep into French society and commercial life.
Regarded by his close colleagues as a ‘little God’, Bömelburg seems to have immediately spotted something unusual and appealing – a kindred spirit perhaps – in the new arrival from Schleswig-Holstein. He dispatched Dohse first to the Berlitz school in Paris to perfect his French, and then on a month’s detachment to each of the departments in the Avenue Foch to get him acquainted with every part of the German security apparatus in Paris. His initiation complete, Bömelburg appointed his young protégé as his personal secretary and, though Bömelburg would not have needed it, his official interpreter.
It was in this capacity that, in July and August 1941, Dohse accompanied his chief and another senior SS intelligence officer on a two-month tour across occupied and Vichy France and into Italy. The three men travelled in some state in Bömelburg’s pride and joy, a requisitioned armour-plated Cadillac chauffeured by his personal driver. The main purpose of the tour was for Bömelburg to reactivate and debrief his old spy network, but the trio did not ignore the opportunity to have fun as well. Their itinerary included Vichy, Dijon, Lyon, Saint-Étienne,
